The U.N. Can't Deliver a Palestinian State

The General Assembly vote that created Israel was the culmination of decades of hard work on the ground.

By

Fouad Ajami

June 1, 2011

It had been quite a scramble, the prelude to the vote on Nov. 29, 1947, on the question of the partition of Palestine. The United Nations itself was only two years old and had just 56 member states; the Cold War was gathering force, and no one was exactly sure how the two pre-eminent powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, would vote. The Arab and Muslim states were of course unalterably opposed, for partition was a warrant for a Jewish state.